Learning to work with Emacs

Allow me to introduce myself and give you a quick overview of what Emacs can do, why you should learn it.

Before we dive in, lets look at a few basic concepts of Emacs. We quickly explore how keybinding are written and executed.

Quick quiz to review what we have learned.

Now we start learning how to operate Emacs. First, lets learn how to manage frames.

You will learn how to create splits, close them and move around from frame to frame.

A few questions to help memorize the keybinding associated with managing Frames.

Learn how to manage buffers. Switching & Killing buffers.

A few question to review important points.

With this lecture you will learn how to open files, open files as root, open files on remote computer.

Save buffer, save as. Open folder in DIRED mode. Insert file at point and toggle read only on a buffer.

Quick quiz to test your knowledge

With this lecture you will learn how to move around the buffer with convenient key binding.

Do search, regular expression search. Search and replace.

You also learn to record keyboard macro and execute them at will.

Quick quiz to review the notion we just learned.

In this section I focus on Cut/Copy/Paste. I introduce Emacs kill ring. When you Cut/Copy, Emacs save the data in a kill ring. You can paste data that was copied a while back.
I also show you how to undo modification with Emacs key binding.

Quick quiz to review what we have learned.

We had a lot of information to digest in the previous section. Here you will make Emacs more comfortable for you.

You will adjust theme, fonts and other modification to make it easier to look at data for extended period of times.

You will learn about Emacs "preference" files: ~/.emacs
Also about ~/.emacs.d directory.
You will add some more customization and practice notions learned in section 3.
You will also see a first example of a custom function that we write in ~/.emacs
I love this function, it fixes indentation for the whole buffer.

Emacs features can be extremely improved by installing different packages. Learn how to browse, search, install and remove packages with Emacs built-in package management system.
There are thousands of packages available, from tools and utilities to games. The list is quite extensive.

While within Emacs, you can do away with other terminal emulator. Emacs provide 3 replacement:

Shell - A read-write text buffer that send your command to a subshell and appends the output to the buffer.

Eshell - Emacs own terminal. Provides its own commands and can redirect output to other buffer.

Term - A full fledge terminal emulator.

Review your knowledge on Emacs shell.